Story by Audrey Kashatus
BOONE, N.C. – On a wet, early April afternoon, the air was thick and humid, moisture hanging heavy. Rain was spitting down slowly after a few hours of steady showers. Everything was wet.
Nestled in a valley amongst rivers and creeks, Valle Crucis is a small community just west of Boone with a couple of churches, a conference center, the famous Mast General Store and a school.
The rain-soaked day brought less than half an inch of rain total. But down at Valle Crucis School, standing water peeked through the grass across the grounds.
“This is where we had field day,” said Mason Heistand, who attended the school back in the 1980s and now has four children, three of whom graduated from Valle Crucis School and one currently enrolled.
“All the memories we have – every blue ribbon and everything – it’s just back here and now it’s just a big mud puddle,” Heistand said.
Built in a notorious flood plain, the school was no stranger to a couple of inches of water. Heistand recalled many days as a kid wearing her rain boots because she knew puddles would litter the school grounds.
But 27 inches of water is a different story.
The night before Hurricane Helene wiped through western North Carolina, Valle Crucis School was not empty. A few maintenance workers along with Leslie Alexander, the Watauga County Schools superintendent, and Bonnie Smith, the principal of Valle Crucis school, stayed well into the night, using water vacuums to pump gallon after gallon of water out of the school.
Alexander left the school around 2:30 a.m., hoping the others would follow.
Smith stayed until the next morning as they continued to pump water out of the building. Once the power went out, however, the vacuums shut off and everything went dark.
“The building just couldn’t take it,” Smith said.
Since October, the school’s windows have borne signs that read, “Unsafe.” The water rose so high, it destroyed multiple areas of the building.
Any items that were safe to recover were relocated to the front room of the school. Piles of books, boxes, instruments and more were stacked in one small room, labeled and waiting to be claimed by their owner.
While a handful of teachers were able to retrieve their personal items from their classrooms once the storm had passed, many of them lost everything or were prohibited from entering the building due to the hazardous conditions.
Jennifer Stevens, a Valle Crucis teacher for the last 25 years, was able to say goodbye to her classroom and take home the few belongings she could. Nothing could prepare her, emotionally or mentally, for that moment.
Given only a couple of minutes to go inside, she entered the school with a facial covering, grabbed what was still salvageable, and drove away, still in shock.
“That really was it,” she said. “That was the last time I was going to be in that classroom.”
A new normal
Valle Crucis School serves about 400 students from pre-kindergarten to eighth grade. The original middle school building was constructed by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.
Due to the school’s frequent flooding, the county broke ground on a brand new school building in December 2022, just a couple of minutes up the road from the original school.
Though the students and teachers were prepared to move out of the old school at the end of the 2024-25 school year, Helene’s unexpected arrival upended those plans. Members of the school community were not only unprepared to say goodbye – they didn’t have a new school to welcome them yet either.
The brand new, 78,000-square-foot school building is just about three months from being completed. Although it’s still riddled with construction equipment and half-built rooms, the sun and mountain views shine through.
Every classroom has one wall entirely made of glass windows, and the ceilings are constructed from locally sourced, natural wood.
Helene stalled the school’s construction after about two-thirds of the building flooded. Eric Jones, the construction site manager, said the storm cost the project about four to six weeks of building time and $100,000.
“It was a lot of pressure,” Jones said. “We couldn’t get it done any faster, but we knew we had to get it done because they had no place to go.”
The Valle Crucis Conference Center was built in the late 19th century as a mission school. It has served the community as many things including a meeting center, a place of worship and a makeshift refuge for flood victims.
Now, the center’s rooms are crammed with desks and chairs, and welcome the hundreds of displaced Valle Crucis students each day.
Smith said it was very important to her that the grade levels were kept together after the storm and students were not placed online for remote learning or farmed out to other schools.
The pre-K students go to Appalachian State University’s Child Development Center. Kindergarten and first grade classes are located in the basement of Holy Cross Episcopal Church, which sits right next to the conference center. The church also holds some of the school’s office staff and nurse. The middle school students attend their classes at Caldwell Community College.
Grades two through five all learn at the Valle Crucis conference center, each class holding anywhere from 16 to 22 students.
The impromptu classrooms show their age. Smart screens are replaced by black chalkboards, linoleum floors are now creaking wood and the walls are more bare, speckled with paint chips.
Anna Brooks Heistand, Mason Heistand’s daughter, is in seventh grade at Valle Crucis School, now attending her classes at Caldwell Community College with the other middle school students.
The new school environment took some getting used to, and they are still adjusting every day. She recalled multiple times being surprised to see college students on her way to the bathroom and feeling out of place.
All of the new locations have been dedicated to helping these students and teachers feel as welcome and normal as they can. Anna Brooks Heistand said she and her classmates were given the opportunity to sign up for a college exploratory class one Friday to experience what they are like.
A new location isn’t all that changed for these kids. Transportation is a whole other “jigsaw puzzle,” as Alexander puts it.
The old Valle Crucis School is now the transportation hub for all buses. Students are dropped off at the school each morning and funneled into a large tent propped up in the parking lot as they await their school bus.
Heistand said the first day of this new schedule was quite strange as she dropped her daughter off so early it was still dark outside, just hoping she would make it onto the right bus.
“Those first few days were a bit of an awkward transition,” she said.
Because of their new bus schedule, the classes lose around 45 minutes of instructional time every day. Combined with the 18 days that schools were closed after the storm and several remote learning days due to weather, it’s been a difficult adjustment for students and teachers.
“We are very purposeful about using every minute we’re here the best we can,” Stevens said.
Even though their classrooms are now scattered and makeshift, the students of Valle Crucis have built a new rhythm.
“All these partners in the community, they just want these kids to have a normal routine,” Heistand said.
Choosing joy
During the storm, school was far from thought.
“We weren’t thinking about anything but surviving,” Heistand said.
Her family found out about the school flooding almost immediately. There were three large mudslides blocking the area between their house and the school, but they could climb atop the mud and survey the damage down by the school.
The area was a catastrophe, she said.
When she found out the school would be closed for good, all she felt was shock.
So did her daughter. “I knew the school flooded all the time, but I didn’t think we’d not go back to the school,” Anna Brooks Heistand said.
Heistand and her daughter were driving past the school a couple days after the storm when they saw her math teacher crying in the parking lot. They pulled over to console her, realizing she just had to say goodbye to her classroom for good.
After explaining the unsafe conditions the school was left in to Anna Brooks Heistand, all three of them were hugging and crying in the parking lot. Heistand said that’s when reality set in.
“These kids are not ever going to get to step foot in their school again.”
It was two weeks after the storm before community members started asking what the future of Valle Crucis School would look like.
When the reality of leaving the school sunk in, Smith jumped into action contacting places that could hold and host students. The conference center agreed to welcome students and teachers and began preparing the classrooms immediately.
“It just shows how much people really care about our kids and making sure that they can get in school,” Smith said.
Heistand said eventually her daughter was begging to go back to school – she wanted to be with her friends.
The first week back at school, Stevens thought there would be a lot of conversation among the students about the storm and their personal experiences, but she said they were all just happy to be with each other again.
The new learning environment was difficult on the teachers, but Smith said the staff has been beyond flexible and made the situation work. On the first day of school in the conference center, Stevens projected images of the students who attended school in the building nearly a century ago for the kids to learn about.
Smith said the most rewarding part of this entire process has been watching the students be happy throughout the turmoil. She said though change may be hardest on adults, she can learn a lot of lessons from the students showing adaptability and resilience.
“For me, as an adult, they help me remember what’s really important,” Stevens said.
If there is one resounding sentiment about the students of Valle Crucis now, it’s that they are happy. To be with their friends, to learn in a school environment again, and interact with one another, is all they wanted.
“They choose to be happy – they choose it,” Stevens said.
Even after losing their building, their routines, and their classrooms, the students of Valle Crucis chose to find joy — not because it was easy, but because it mattered.
In August, they will walk into a brand-new school, carrying new backpacks, books and supplies, and the memories those 27 inches of rain brought.
“These kids will never forget this experience,” Stevens said.
